One aspect of maintaining large numbers of servers within a facility (e.g. server farm) involves regulating the air temperature and relative humidity levels as well as airflow to ensure operating conditions favorable to long-term functioning of rack-mounted servers. High temperature and/or abnormal humidity conditions lead to shortened lifespan of the servers, increased outages, and unplanned service interruptions.
Continuous, regular sensing of temperature and humidity conditions within the closed server rack cabinets presents a variety of logistical challenges. A closed cabinet design in data centers prevents accurate inside-of-cabinet climate measurement without direct disturbance of that targeted environment. Assessing and troubleshooting cabinet climate abnormalities (e.g., excessively high temperature and/or relative humidity) are limited to reports from customer equipment which often report chip-level temperatures rather than a climate-envelope temperature of the cabinet itself.